March 12, 2017 (Truthout) -- With Washington, DC, now transformed into a perpetual nonsense machine, it was easy to miss the George W. Bush Revisionist History Tour as it slid through the shallow plastic media trench last week on rails lubricated with old tears, but there he was.

After eight years of almost complete radio silence, the former president was all over the place, yukking it up with the likes of Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Kimmel to peddle his new book and flash that folksy smirk we came to know so well.

So what? Every celebrity does a book, especially former presidents, and it is noteworthy that Bush had the common decency to put some rigging tape over his mouth while President Obama was in office. It didn't take long, though, for things to get weird. A lot of people who really should know better -- in the print, network and online news media, on social media and other forums, and in "real life" -- got all goo-goo-eyed over him. People I've known for years exclaimed over how funny and cute he was on Ellen! And how he's friends with Michelle Obama! And isn't he just so much better than Trump?